A Philosopher’s View

• Philosophy
  • Philosophy is the investigation of fundamental issues by rational argument.
  • It’s defined by:
    • Its subject matter: Any Fundamental Issue.
    • Its method: The Analysis of Arguments
    • Its mindset: Skepticism.

• Analysis of Knowledge
  • As Plato showed, knowledge is more than just believing correctly that something is the case.

• Applied Philosophy
  • Applied Philosophy is the application of the philosophic method — the analysis of arguments — to matters of public concern.

• Arguments
  • An argument is a piece of reasoning, from premises to a conclusion.

• Democracy
  • The idea of democracy is simple: rule by the people. But functioning democracies are complex, for good reason.

• Epistemic Pitfalls
  • Reasoning can go awry due to bias, logical fallacies, the “mist and veil of words,” fallacious statistics, motivated reasoning, and disinformation.

• Epistemology
  • Epistemology is the theory of knowledge and rational belief.

• Ethics
  • Ethics is the normative and conceptual inquiry into right and wrong, good and bad, and what ought to be.

• Free Will and Determinism
  • The problem of free will and determinism, as David Hume wrote, is “the most contentious question of metaphysics, the most contentious science.”

• History of Philosophy
  • The history of philosophy is the history of philosophic arguments.

• Logic
  • Logic, the normative study of reasoning, is concerned with developing formal and informal methods for evaluating arguments.

• Neural Networks
  • A neural network is a computer program that modifies itself in roughly the same way the brain does — by adjusting connections among its “neurons.”

• Probability
  • Despite the well-developed mathematical theory of probability, the nature of probability remains a puzzlement.

• Political Philosophy
  • Political philosophy is the normative and conceptual inquiry into forms of government.

• Scientific Theories
  • A scientific theory is (i) designed to explain certain kinds of phenomena, (ii) defined by its postulates, and (iii) supported or disproved by its predictions.
  • Big Bang, Electromagnetism, Energy, Evolution, General Relativity, Global Warming, Mendel’s Heredity, Newton’s Gravitation, Plate Tectonics, Thermodynamics, Quantum Mechanics, Special Relativity

• Skepticism
  • Practical Skepticism is the disposition to believe based only on evidence and rational argument. Philosophic Skepticism, by contrast, is the doctrine that there’s no rational basis for believing various classes of propositions.

• Statistics
  • Statistics is the branch of mathematics dealing with presenting, summarizing, and making inferences from data.
  • Though essential to the social sciences, there is fundamental disagreement, between Bayesian and Classical Statistics, about the nature of statistical inference.

• Supreme Court Decision-Making
  • Judicial Review, Legal Reasoning, Precedents, Common Law, “Interpreting” the Constitution, Judicial Law Making, Originalism and Living Constitutionalism
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    

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